Buried in the announcements of AMD's Financial Analyst Day were the new processor pricing that was announced for the AMD A-series desktop processors.

These suggested pricing changes will take effect on May 10th, 2015. AMD offers guidance of the Suggested Etail Price (SEP) in USD, final retail price is set by individual retailers.

The AMD A-series APU are designed as SoCs for DirectX 12 and AMD is touting its independent testing showed a 41 per cent framerate increase under DirectX 12. Additionally, using DirectX 12 the AMD A-series APU was able to demonstrate an incredible 511 per cent increase in performance per watt, the outfit pointed out.

With the launch of the Wii U approaching ever nearer, Nintendo will be slashing the price of the original Wii for the holiday season from $150 to $130. The move isn’t unexpected; but apparently it will only apply to a new Wii bundle that will start arriving at retailers now (but should be in wide release by no later than October 28th).

Nintendo has put a new Wii package together for this $130 price, which will include a black Wii console, one Wii Remote, one Nunchuk, and Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort on one disc. The fact that Nintendo is putting Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort on one disc in this bundle is interesting.

It looks like Microsoft will combat the Wii and Wii U this holiday season with a number of holiday bundle options for the Xbox 360. Sony, with the PlayStation 3, will opt to sell the new SuperSlim in two bundles (priced at $270 and $300) that include large hard drives as well as bundled games. At this point, it would seem that Sony is not planning to make cuts on their hardware this holiday season, but Microsoft has slashed $50 from the price of its holiday bundles in North America.

With leaks and rumors of Apple’s iPad Mini aplenty ahead of launch, it has come to our attention that German retailer Media Markt has as much as 16 versions of the device in inventory.

Many punters believed Apple would price the entry level model at 299 dollars/euros, but the inventory listing shows the entry level wi-fi only 8GB model for €249. There are a total of 16 SKUs in black and white, with 8, 16, 32 and 64GB of storage. The 16GB version is priced at €349, and the 32GB and 64GB versions cost €449 and €549, so no surprises there, the usual €100 bump for extra storage.

The same goes for cellular versions, they cost €100 more than wi-fi only SKUs, so the cheapest data enabled iPad mini costs €349 with 8GB of storage. However, we reckon most consumers will go for the cheaper wi-fi only models rather than high-end cellular SKUs priced at €500+.

In related news, 9to5mac claims that the iPad Mini will not be the only new device at its own launch, as the company is set to roll out a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The MacBook should also come with a thinner and lighter enclosure and, as usual, higher price, but we'll see soon enough.

In an interesting move, Microsoft has announced that they have slashed the price of Kinect from $149.99 to $109.99. The move was confirmed by none other than Microsoft’s own Major Nelson. Word is, however, that the price drop is unique to North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific regions. Kinect will also see a price drop in Australia and New Zealand. There are no plans to adjust the price in any other regions at this time.

What we don’t know yet is what will be included with Kinect after this price drop. In the short term, retailers that we spoke with tell us that they will be selling out remaining inventory, which currently is primarily the Kinect Sensor with Kinect Adventures.

As for the future, Microsoft has not indicated that there will be any change; so we suspect that it will continue to be bundled with Kinect Adventures for the time being. The price drop is an interesting move as the company heads into the holiday season. But it could be driven by the amount of upcoming titles that will offer Kinect support to be released this holiday season that are part of the driving force behind the pricing decision.

It has been a while since Apple introduced its new iPad with new A5X dual core, quad core graphics and since the initial release, the product has been on allocation. Well not anymore, as a quick check of Apple's US web store and few stores in bigger and smaller European countries reveals.

If you buy any of the new iPads, they will ship without any delays. After the launch, it took up to three weeks of waiting to get the new iPad but now it ships on the same day.

It is also cute that in European markets you are getting Wi-Fi + Cellular iPad and now iPad 4G. This is more of less false advertising, as the iPad’s 4G was not supported in European networks due ro different frequencies and bands used.

If you are in the mood for some latest trends, a Retina 15 inch Apple notebook it will cost you between €2279 or €2899 for a better strapped model. If you pick a 100MHz faster CPU, 16GB of Ram and 768 GB of SSD memory, you will hit "magical" €3849 euro.

A decent mouse and fancy carry bag and such will easily tip i over to 4000 euro. In fact, just picking a few cables and converters from Apple store got us to €4163 and this is not the end of it.

One can be only lucky that Apple doesn’t make cars or TVs. Otherwise you would be talking to your bank about additional mortgage, most probably the third one.

While Nintendo still has not announced the price for the Wii U, analysts that we have spoken with have expressed significant concern over the pricing of the unit. Analysts are not the only ones concerned about the price of the Wii U; Nintendo is also.

In fact, Nintendo was so concerned about price that at one point during the development of the Wii U, the company seriously considering dropping the second screen as a way to reduce costs. The Wii U’s Game Pad is expensive and could potentially be one of the most expensive controllers that have ever been produced.

Of course, Nintendo now believes after much time and investment in research and development that it can produce the Wii U at a competitive price that consumers are willing to pay. Still, those we have spoken with are not so sure.

Some compromises had to be made for the unit to reach its price target, whatever Nintendo believes that to be. However, it is evident that the unit isn’t going to be cheap no matter how Nintendo spins it. The company has had to balance a number of things to make it work. There is the cost of another Wii U Game Pad and the Pro Controller, which will be sold separately; these certainly will be an extra expense that most will likely embrace.

Nintendo is expected to confirm pricing as they head into the holiday season, and sources tell us that we should expect them to wait till the last second to do so. Some analysts tell us, however, that they believe the unit price will have to hover near $300 when it launches.

Beancounters at IHS iSuppli delivered a report on memory and storage and have found that the market prices will not bounce back to pre-flood levels until 2014. Despite the fact that production is recovering fast, average selling prices will not fluctuate much until then, courtesy of the October flooding in Thailand.

HDD pricing in Q4 2011 was up 28 percent compared to Q3. Average selling price is said to have been stable throughout Q1 of 2012 and is expected to drop only slightly in Q2 2012.

Production is expected to recover completely by Q3 2012 whereas shipments seem to have just about recovered. In fact, shipments are expected to exceed pre-flood levels for the first time in Q3 2012.

It is expected however that HDD pricing will remain inflated. Analyst for storage systems Fang Zhang said that manufacturers have greater pricing power and can keep average prices. He added that large mergers of leading HDD manufacturers have resulted in significant dominance, allowing the companies to keep prices high.

Although Intel is yet to deliver the official announcement on its 7-series chipsets, Digitimes quotes sources from the market claiming that main motherboard makers are already slashing the prices.

The same sources claim that these companies initially planned to increase prices in order to compensate for growing costs of copper. However, the slowdown in growth of shipments means that price wars will be the name of the game. Naturally, we like such games.

Many manufacturers already sell their motherboards in the channel, in order to get a head start and decrease pricing of mid-range and entry-level products. These price drops are said to range from 3-10 percent and should ensure an even bigger piece of the cake for these companies.

During the period when Apple was shipping iPads starting at $499 / €479 and Google was working hard on Honeycomb Android 3.0, we were wondering pricing of future tablets.

By late 2010 and early 2011 we had a chance to check out a few tablets based on new dual core CPUs, including Tegra 2, TI Omap. We again raised a question about pricing, telling all our industry partners that they have to endow their tablets with iPad-like quality but get them out at significantly lower prices.

In one of these conversations, I expressed my vision of the tablet market in a few years where I said that once they drop to $199, I will have at least three of them mounted on my apartment walls. One of them would end up on the kitchen wall, one in the bathroom, one in the living room and one can’t forget the bedroom tablet. The idea is that you pick a tablet that’s near you and do some basic web browsing or simple gaming. This was my vision in late 2010, early 2011.

It looks like I was not far off as with Kindle Fire, we almost got to that point. Kindle Fire can offer Amazon market, has a bunch of nice content, can play movies, open an ebook and get you to your favourite web page. This is pretty much everything that most of us need.

Early in 2011 we had a chance to play with Barns and Noble Nook, and this $250 + tax device was a step in right direction, but without hacking it, you could not have any Android Market apps on it. This was the only wrong thing about it.

This gets us to Motorola Xoom, which launched at $799 for its 3G version with Verison. This money can buy four Kindle Fire tablets, something that I need to fulfill the digital home dream. I still don’t know if anyone is planning to make some wall docking stations that can charge these four $199 tablets placed on walls, but there should be a way to make something, if you are not afraid to play with some tools.

Now people in Europe are facing two major problems. First one is that Kindle Fire is unlikely to ship in this year to the old continent and the second one is that $199 will probably jump to more than €199 ($265.6 with today’s exchange rate) which gets you to a slightly higher cost than what US customers end up paying.

The catch is that $199 shipped from Amazon (etail) stays at this price. If you buy this device in California Best Buy you have to pay an average of 9 percent sales tax and the same device in retail ends up at roughly $217. In Europe the VAT (Value Added Tax. Mehrwertsteuer ger.) is always included in the final price, no matter if you are buying from etail or retail. This tax varies from country to country and it averages at 20 percent. Well, we guess someone has to pay for social/medical insurance and all these bailouts after all.

It is no surprise that Microsoft has finally admitted that prices have been rising on Xbox Live Arcade titles. Chris Chharla, the XBLA portfolio director, told GI.biz that despite the higher prices, consumers are willing to pay for quality products.

Here at Fudzilla this comes as little surprise to us, as we have noted this trend before. Despite the suggestion that consumers will pay for quality software, the truth is that we still hear and see a lot of people complaining about the cost of a lot of the things released on XBLA. While there are exceptional titles that deserve the $15 or 1,200 Microsoft Points that they cost, many of them would be better priced if they cost $10 or 800 Microsoft Points. It does seem that Xbox consumers know this.

The stats offered show that in 2009 only 21 of 86 titles cost 1,200 points, and by 2010 27 out of 85 titles cost 1,200 Microsoft Points. So far this year already, 20 titles have been released that cost 1,200 Microsoft Points and there are still a significant amount of major titles to be released before the end of the year, so it would not be surprising if this number reaches 40 or more by the end of 2011.

In our opinion this just confirms the trend that we have noted all along. Developers that we have spoken with, however, indicate that part of the reason for the price increases is simply that the development cycle is becoming longer and it simply is costing more to deliver the higher quality titles that consumers are demanding and that seem to be successful on XBLA. In addition, with so many choices and some difficulty in promoting releases, sales still may not work out to cover development costs, so the higher starting selling price helps.